Instinct
by Musamea
Summary: A conversation of sorts between two parents in Teach Me Tonight.


**Title:** Instinct  
**Author: **Musamea  
**Rating:** PG-13 for language  
**Disclaimer:** Amy Sherman-Palladino owns everything. Except for space-time; Einstein owns that.  
**Summary:** A conversation of sorts between two parents in "Teach Me Tonight."

This one's for Cadenza, of course. She's always had dibs.

* * *

"Chris?" He hears her whisper over the phone. No _hello_, or the more usual _hey, stud_, or even any teasing that he answers so quickly on a Thursday night. 

Her voice has that thin, barely leashed panicking quality that he's only heard once. And his thoughts fly back to that night, seventeen years ago, when she told him that she was pregnant.

"Lor? What's wrong?" he asks, immediately, because he knows this, knows her. Her accusations are forgotten. The air is suddenly too thick to breathe.

"I… the… Chris, the front end of the car is completely gone, and I don't know what… she called me from the hospital and I-" She's speaking even faster than usual, which is no mean feat for Lorelai, and he presses the phone closer to his ear.

"Hey, slow down," he says, even though he's thinking _Don't stop_; _tell me everything that happened. Right now. _"What happened? Who called?"

But he knows, even before she says their daughter's name aloud. There's no one else in the world who can get Lorelai this worked up; and after their fight, she wouldn't be calling him unless it had something to do with Rory. _Something life or death and not just why-the-hell-did-you-cut-yesterday's-talk-with-her-off-short_, he amends. And suddenly she's not anywhere close to giving him the details quickly enough.

"-she was in the car with him and they ran into a ditch or a pole or something… trying to swerve around an animal. What do they teach kids in Driver's Ed these days anyway, huh? When I took the class, they told us that if it was anything smaller than a pack of greyhounds, we were supposed to run the damn thing over-"

"Lorelai!" He doesn't yell often, especially not at her; it's not his way, even if she _has _always been able to simultaneously bring out the best and worst in him. But the situation calls for it, and he yells at her, as if an increase in volume can somehow throw her a safety line over the airwaves, across space and time.

She keeps going for a couple more seconds, pushed on by momentum and hyperventilation. Then his voice registers and she stops, and he hears her take a deep, ragged breath.

"Is she okay?" he asks.

"No, Chris!" And for a single, sickening moment, he can swear his heart stops. His mind goes blank except for snippets of words and phrases: _the condensed OED_, _coffee_, _euthanasia_, _oh God, God, God, let her be all right_. Then- "Her arm's in a cast, for God's sake, and they took her away for more tests, and I ran out of there before the doctor came back-"

His stomach unclenches. The blood rushes back through his veins and his head spins with dizziness. A sudden, irrational memory of his high school Psych course and the lecture on the parasympathetic nervous system surfaces. He pushes it aside impatiently.

"Why'd you leave?" he asks. The part of him that is most frustrated by being stuck in another goddamned _state_ while his kid is in the hospital wants to yell more, wants to demand _How could you leave her alone? How can you be sure she's fine?_

He closes his eyes, reminds himself that two panicking parents aren't going to have an ice cube's chance in hell of handling this situation. "Lor?"

"I wanted to find the punk who was driving," she says, her voice fierce and low and full of unshed tears. "How _dare_ he just leave her at the hospital? But I ran into Luke first-" _Luke? Oh right, the diner guy_. "-and then we had this big fight and-"

"You had a big fight with Luke?" he repeats. There was a joke that he'd heard or read once, something about how a baby comes out clutching half of his or her mother's brains like some sort of victory prize or a malfunctioned IUD. The same applies to fathers, he's finding.

"Yes!" she snaps. "You're not the only person I Zelda Fitzgerald on, you know." He hears her take another deep breath. "Chris, I'm sorry. I was just so… when I saw the car… I couldn't think of anyone to call but you."

One corner of his mouth tips up at this, and it doesn't even occur to him to say _Because you fought with Luke and so you couldn't talk to him?_ This is something they will always share, no matter how much distance is between them, no matter how much water flows under the bridge or how hard they both try to gain 'closure' about the past. They are parents to the same daughter, and that means they will never quite be out of each other's lives. They are, at this moment, the only two people in the entire world who understand exactly how the other one is feeling.

"Chris? Say something."

"Everything's gonna be okay, Lor."

She sniffles. "How do you know?"

"You just made a literary reference," he informs her. "Go on now; go back to the hospital so you can get Rory when she escapes the clutches of those quacks."

Her laugh comes weak and uncertain over the line, but it's what he has been looking for and it is enough.

"Thanks, Chris."

"Yeah. Call me if anything comes up, okay?" It's just barely a request.

"I will. Bye."

"Bye."

He stands for a moment, with the phone still cupped between shoulder and ear, as if the dial tone can give him more information. Then he flips it closed and stuffs it into his back pocket with one hand, his other already reaching for his jacket. He wastes several precious minutes searching for the keys to his bike, because the Volvo still can't match her for speed and only has a quarter tank of gas, and he'll be damned if he has to stop for anything before he reaches Stars Hollow tonight.

* * *

**Author's Note:** The to-swerve-or-not-to-swerve instruction is based on something actually said in a real Driver's Ed course, though it has been Lorelai-d up for the purposes of this fic. 

Christopher remembers the baby joke from Anne Lamott's _Bird by Bird_.


End file.
